Charles Petzold Quotes & Sayings

You're twelve years old. One horrible day your best friend's family moves to another town. You speak to your friend on the telephone now and then, but telephone conversations just aren't the same as those late-night sessions with the flashlights blinking out Morse code. Your second-best friend, who lives in the house next door to yours, eventually becomes your new best friend. It's time to teach your new best friend some Morse code and get the late-night flashlights blinking again. — Charles Petzold

communication simply requires — Charles Petzold

Free lunches don't come cheap. — Charles Petzold

Many MIDI files contain entire musical compositions. Because MIDI supports only 16 channels, however, no more than 16 different instruments can play at any time, and one of those is the key-based percussion instrument. — Charles Petzold

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API. — Charles Petzold

Blend is great for designers because it implements a lot of sophisticated behaviours, but for what I like to do, hand coding XAML is preferable, particularly because I have to publish it. — Charles Petzold

A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording. — Charles Petzold

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday — Charles Petzold

Just as Morse code provides a good introduction to the nature of codes, the telegraph provides a good introduction to the hardware of the computer. — Charles Petzold

Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven — Charles Petzold

I said early on in this chapter that we would need 144 relays for our adding machine. Here's how I figured that out: Each — Charles Petzold

a digital design engineer, you would spend long hours going through the TTL Data Book familiarizing yourself with the types of TTL chips that were available. Once you knew all your tools, you could actually build the computer I showed in Chapter 17 out of TTL chips. Wiring the chips together is a lot easier than wiring individual transistors — Charles Petzold

I started out with machine code and assembly language. — Charles Petzold

In 1948, while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, he published a paper in the Bell System Technical Journal entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" that not only introduced the word bit in print but established a field of study today known as information theory. Information theory is concerned with transmitting digital information in the presence of noise (which usually prevents all the information from getting through) and how to compensate for that. In 1949, he wrote the first article about programming a computer to play chess, and in 1952 he designed a mechanical mouse controlled by relays that could learn its way around a maze. Shannon was also well known at Bell Labs for riding a unicycle and juggling simultaneously. — Charles Petzold

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology. — Charles Petzold

Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours - but not always. — Charles Petzold

Bits also play a part in logic, that strange blend of philosophy and mathematics for which a primary goal is to determine whether certain statements are true or false. True — Charles Petzold

NOP stands for (and is pronounced) no op, as in no operation. The NOP causes the processor to do absolutely nothing. What's it good for? Filling space. The 8080 can usually execute a bunch of NOP instructions without anything bad happening — Charles Petzold

We don't carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism - a messy back-and-forth kind of thing. — Charles Petzold

You probably don't have much of a choice. — Charles Petzold

Xamarin.Forms allows you to be as platform-independent or as platform-specific as you need to be. Xamarin.Forms doesn't replace Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android; rather it integrates with them. — Charles Petzold

All modern MIDI synthesizers are capable of polyphony, which means they can play more than one note at a time and more than one instrument at a time. — Charles Petzold

When the iPhone app is built, the Xamarin C# compiler generates C# Intermediate Language (IL) as usual, but it then makes use of the Apple compiler on the Mac to generate native iPhone machine code just like the Objective-C compiler. The calls from the app to the iPhone APIs are the same as though the application were written in Objective-C. For the Android app, the Xamarin C# compiler generates IL, which runs on a version of Mono on the device alongside the Java engine, but the API calls from the app are pretty — Charles Petzold

In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation — Charles Petzold

I really liked figuring things out on my own. Early on in the development of a new version of Windows, I would explore it, I would try out various things, I would see what worked, I would see what didn't work. — Charles Petzold

In the same way that Morse code reduces written language to dots and dashes, the spoken version of the code reduces speech to just two vowel sounds. The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two vowel sounds, two different anything, really, can with suitable combinations convey all types of information. — Charles Petzold

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick — Charles Petzold

MIDI made a natural transition to the PC. The MIDI messages that make up a musical composition can be saved as MIDI files, which are collections of MIDI messages with timing information. — Charles Petzold

We could just as reasonably base our number system on eight (if we were cartoon characters) or four (if we were lobsters) or even two (if we were dolphins). — Charles Petzold

Some people believe that Moore's Law will continue to be accurate until about 2015. — Charles Petzold

I felt more like a scientist exploring nature, and Windows was my environment. You don't pass judgment on nature; you just explain how it works. — Charles Petzold

Some programs - especially games - require that your system be set to a particular color depth and resolution. Often such special settings are different from your usual mode, though. — Charles Petzold